Pay-as-you-go or pay-per-use business models have been used in many areas of commerce, from cellular telephones to commercial laundromats. In developing a pay-as-you go business, a provider, for example, a cellular telephone provider, offers the use of hardware (a cellular telephone) at a lower-than-market cost in exchange for a commitment to remain a subscriber to their network. In this specific example, the customer receives a cellular phone for little or no money in exchange for signing a contract to become a subscriber for a given period of time. Over the course of the contract, the service provider recovers the cost of the hardware by charging the consumer for using the cellular phone.
The pay-as-you-go business model is built on metering usage. In the case of a cellular telephone, the metric for metering use is minutes or megabytes of data transported. In a pay-as-you-go business model for computers, where a service provider or underwriter subsidizes the cost of the hardware anticipating future revenue, there are many aspects of usage that can be monitored or metered. However, not all sources of metering data can be uniformly relied on. When data suggests the computer is in use, but is not, the subscriber may not get full value from his or her subscription. Conversely, when the computer is being used but not metered, the service provider does not receive fair compensation.